George Watkins: Hollister's strong baseball tradition

Baseball is more than a family affair in Hollister - it's a community project.

It starts in Little League. One of the highlights of the Opening Day ceremonies is that every team from T-ball on up is escorted to the field by a pair of Hollister High players in front of a crowd of nearly 3,000. The big day ends with a fireworks show.

"It's a tradition that has been going on for years,'' Hollister High baseball coach Billy Aviles said. "My kids (Baler ballplayers) know what it's like to be those kids.''

Those kids, by the way, have won the District 9 Little League major division title - an area that includes all of the Salinas Valley - six straight years and 10 times in the past 12 years.

The Hollister High baseball team has its own traditions, and that usually means cranking out winning teams. Going back to 2005 and including games through last Friday, the Balers' combined league record is 136-23. That's about a 10-year winning percentage of .855. Since Aviles took over as head coach in 2011 he has kept that winning pace right on target. His teams have a league record of 51-9.

Hollister is 6-0 this year in the MBL Gabilan Division and will take a string of three straight shutouts into Friday's home game against Palma. It will be another special night of baseball in the San Benito County town. Friday the Balers will break out their camouflage uniforms as part of Military Appreciation Night and play the game under the lights, starting at 6:30 p.m.

Aviles, who came to Hollister from Tuscon, Ariz., to help his dad's business about 15 years ago and after spending two years playing independent league baseball, runs a no-nonsense program. His uncompromising team rules: short hair, tattoos covered, no earrings, no facial hair, no headphones, shirts tucked in when you get off the bus.

"I tell the parents I'm here to teach them to be young men,'' Aviles said.

But Hollister baseball is far from being a military school atmosphere.

"We demand six days a week for sure for baseball,'' Aviles said. "We can't play on the seventh day, but we do team activities.''

Fortunately for Hollister, several ranchers have baseball connections and often welcome the team to use the open space for such activities as fishing and camping.

"We go fishing, have a barbecue,'' Aviles said. "We went skeet shooting last weekend. We'll spend the night in a cabin. We try to make it a family atmosphere. We'll have a team dinner the night before every game.''

The extra time together has paid off in more ways than one. Not only did the Balers miss by just one game last year of capturing their eighth straight league title - Palma nosed them out - but in the past five years 33 Baler ballplayers have earned some sort of scholarship to four-year schools, some to Top 10 programs.

Hunter Haworth, who hasn't allowed a run in more than 18 innings of pitching, has already committed to Chico State.

The team ERA is good, but the GPA may be even more impressive. The Hollister grade-point average is 3.4.

Pitching, however, has been the constant in Hollister's long-term success. A Baler pitcher has either been the league's Most Valuable Pitcher or Most Valuable Player five straight years. And in 2008 it was a Hollister pitcher who had the league's lowest ERA even though he wasn't an MVP.

"Our emphasis is pitching, defense and timely hitting, in that order,'' Aviles said. "We take a ton of ground balls every day.''

Hollister returned about 18 of its 24 players from last year's 23-7 squad. Many are baseball-only players. The Balers have also overcome the loss of Jeff George, who hit .385 last year, third best in the league. He had a hip injury that required surgery similar to what happened last year to Kyle Czaplak of Pacific Grove.

About the only thing Hollister's baseball program hasn't done is win a CCS title. But few have been as close as this class of seniors. In the past three years the Balers have been to the D-I title game twice; they lost in the semifinals in the other.

"Our goal is to win the last game of the year, on the last Saturday night of the season at (San Jose) Municipal Stadium,'' Aviles said.

Hartnell College

Your team is getting shelled, and your pitchers are getting tagged. What's a manager to do?

Hartnell pitchers were roughed for 45 runs last week, giving up 10 runs or more in their three games.

"It was an odd week,'' Hartnell coach Rich Givens said. "We were pitching behind (in the count) too much. Then you throw a fastball over the plate and they were getting hit. They weren't always getting hit hard, but they were finding holes. When you're not scoring runs, sometimes pitchers think that you have to make the perfect pitch.''

Givens knows a thing or two about pitching. He didn't crack the North Salinas High starting rotation until his senior year in 1973. But by the time he was through with high school, Hartnell College and San Jose State, he was drafted by the Detroit Tigers. His minor-league manager was Jim Leyland. And he found out only later that when he was released after one year, Kirk Gibson took his locker.

Givens has been on both ends of blowouts as a pitcher.

"The last game I pitched in high school was against Salinas High,'' he said. "We lost 20-6. I went the whole seven innings. They only got seven or eight hits, but we made 10 errors.''

Givens was a strikeout pitcher, fanning a high of 17 against Alisal when the east Salinas school was a top-notch baseball team in the early 1970s.

When Givens was a sophomore at Hartnell, heat-seeker Ernie Camacho of Alisal, who went on to a 10-year major-league career and was voted into the Salinas Valley Sports Hall of Fame last summer, was a freshman on the staff.

In the summer of 1978, when the Salinas Angels of the California League were the Class A club of the California Angels, Givens was given something of a seven-day tryout with the organization.

"I threw on the mound or in the bullpen for them for seven days in a row,'' he said. "The next day I pitched in a Connie Mack game and gave up 10 runs in the first inning.''

Prep Top 10

- 1. Hollister (7-2): Balers three-man rotation has yet to allow an earned run in league play.

- 2. Pacific Grove (3-2): Breakers have won 22 straight MTAL games. Carmel won 34 in a row from late 2006 to early 2008.